China’s share-to-count ratio during the pre-pandemic period is increasing, and if so, how do the researchers in China come together?
Certain policies in Chinese academia might also be driving the trend. In many cases, says Shu, only the first author of a paper gets credit for a publication in China’s evaluation and promotion systems. If China-based researchers end up in the middle of the author list, they might be less motivated to collaborate internationally. “They will focus on their own projects, and may be less likely to join others’ projects,” he says.
Simon quit his job in Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina because of the policies they had against Chinese collaboration. He told Times Higher Education (THE) that he had faced undue bureaucracy when organizing research trips to China, had been stopped from taking students to visit the country, and that the university had tried to shut down an informal policy discussion that he had arranged between colleagues and Chinese embassy staff. The university told THE it has had a fast commitment to maintaining the integrity of research and taking seriously legitimate concerns about the need to safeguard US academic research from improper foreign influence.
Both Wagner and Freeman also noticed a pre-pandemic drop — particularly in US–China collaboration — in their own research, which uses much larger databases than the Nature Index.
Digging into the data, however, confirms another stark trend in global science. It is clear that the country is contributing more to high-quality research than it used to, but it is still less than it used to. China has a Share/Count ratio of over 80%, meaning there wouldn’t be international collaboration in the foreseeable future. In 2015, the ratio in China was 75%, which has been rising for several years. The ratio for other major science nations has been going down. For example, the US ratio was 75% in 2015 and 70% in 2022, and for Germany, the ratio fell from 56% to 50% over the same period. There is a trend in some scientific journals and fields. China’s Share/Count ratio in the journal Analytical Chemistry, for example, was 96% in 2022.
Although ways of facilitating virtual collaboration took off during the pandemic, Caroline Wagner, who studies international scientific collaboration at the Ohio State University in Columbus, says that face-to-face meetings are still crucial for bringing researchers together in the first place. She says the research she did showed that 85% of international collaborations begin face-to-face. Some partnerships begin completely.
China as the Belt and Road: Implications of COVID-19 for low- and middle-income countries and for the future of the world
The Chinese Scholarship Council halted funding for many Chinese academics to spend time as visiting scholars abroad during the swine flue threat, says Shu. It will take time for the number of Chinese scholars visiting the West to recover.
“The trend began prior to the pandemic, but you can’t dismiss COVID-19 as having an impact on anything and everything,” says Denis Simon, former executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University in Suzhou, China.
Nature reported last month that China’s decoupling from the countries loosely described as the West mirrors its strengthening of science links with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (see Nature 622, 669–670; 2023). There are many benefits for China to be boosting science in LMICs, which can be done with more research funding and capacity building.
Researchers are motivated through a mixture of incentives — one of which is to do what it takes to get on with the job. But researchers also operate in a larger context. In the words of the UN Human Development Report, the world is in “a new uncertainty complex”, and research is essential to the search for solutions. Both China and the United States need to build and work on shared initiatives such as the SDGs. Their twin paths ultimately need to become one.
Meeting the Future Leaders of the Organization of Cosmic Science and Applied Science in the Middle East: China-Europe Cooperation in Climate Change
China and Europe have been talking about working more closely. Hou Jianguo, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, traveled to Africa last month to see if they could improve ties.
There are signs that there will be no divergence, and that scientific dialogue between China and the West is getting back on track. The meeting this month between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping seemed to suggest a constructive approach to relations is returning. California signed a world-first agreement with China in October in an attempt to deepen collaboration on climate research and policy.
